Books like China Shadow by Clarissa Ross

Jung Chang paints a vivid portrait of China’s social conditions, tracing the lives of families and women from the 1920s through the Cultural Revolution in a personal, biographical style.

Insightful memoir by former personal physician to Mao Zedong, detailing the Chinese leader’s daily life, political decisions, and personal quirks from 1954 to 1976.

A Peace Corps teacher chronicles life in the remote Sichuan town of Fuling, weaving firsthand observations of Chinese countryside, historical moments, and the looming Three Gorges Dam into vivid travel prose.

LOVER'S BOUNTY A sweet-talking scoundrel left Silver Matlock stranded at the altar, escaping with the meager remains of her family's fortune. Faced with financial ruin, the rebellious Colorado beauty turned to bounty hunter Jared Newman for help--entrusting her fate to the handsome and secretive stranger who had witnessed her humiliation. Haunted by the murder of his loved ones, Jared's search for the killer brought him West. And now he was saddled with a high-spirited hellion seeking vengeance of her own--a stunning spitfire whose courage kindled long-forgotten desires within the rugged, embittered manhunter...and whose blistering passion spawned the golden promise of a soul-healing love.

A daring Irish spy in Victorian London, a charismatic rogue, and a passionate love affair in the Regency era collide in Katherine O'Neal's latest historical romance adventure, perfect for fans of Regency romances and Victorian spionage alike.

Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution that is turning China upside down.In this utterly surprising and deeply personal book, acclaimed National Public Radio reporter Rob Gifford, a fluent Mandarin speaker, takes the dramatic journey along Route 312 from its start in the boomtown of Shanghai to its end on the border with Kazakhstan. Gifford reveals the rich mosaic of modern Chinese life in all its contradictions, as he poses the crucial questions that all of us are asking about China: Will it really be the next global superpower? Is it as solid and as powerful as it looks from the outside? And who are the ordinary Chinese people, to whom the twenty-first century is supposed to belong? Gifford is not alone on his journey. The largest migration in human history is taking place along highways such as Route 312, as tens of millions of people leave their homes in search of work. He sees signs of the booming urban economy everywhere, but he also uncovers many of the country's frailties, and some of the deep-seated problems that could derail China's rise. The whole compelling adventure is told through the cast of colorful characters Gifford meets: garrulous talk-show hosts and ambitious yuppies, impoverished peasants and tragic prostitutes, cell-phone salesmen, AIDS patients, and Tibetan monks. He rides with members of a Shanghai jeep club, hitchhikes across the Gobi desert, and sings karaoke with migrant workers at truck stops along the way.As he recounts his travels along Route 312, Rob Gifford gives a face to what has historically, for Westerners, been a faceless country and breathes life into a nation that is so often reduced to economic statistics. Finally, he sounds a warning that all is not well in the Chinese heartlands, that serious problems lie ahead, and that the future of the West has become inextricably linked with the fate of 1.3 billion Chinese people."Informative, delightful, and powerfully moving . . . Rob Gifford's acute powers of observation, his sense of humor and adventure, and his determination to explore the wrenching dilemmas of China's explosive development open readers' eyes and reward their minds." --Robert A. Kapp, president, U.S.-China Business Council, 1994-2004From the Hardcover edition.

Imagine if a national political figure like Benjamin Franklin was also a paranormal investigator, one who wrote up his investigations with a storytelling flair that reads like a combination of M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearn, and Zhuangzi-with a dash of the bureaucratic absurdism of Kafka sprinkled in, alongside a healthy dose of H.P. Lovecraft's weird antiquarianism. In China, at roughly the same time that Franklin was filling the sky with electrified kites, there was such a figure. He was Special Advisor to the emperor of China, Imperial Librarian, and one of the most celebrated scholars and poets of his time. His name was Ji Yun (纪昀). Beginning in 1789, Ji Yun published five volumes of weird tales and ghost stories that combined supernatural autobiographical accounts with early speculative fictions. Combining insights into Chinese magic and metaphysics with tales of cannibal villages, sentient fogs, alien encounters, and fox spirits; as well as accounts of soul swapping, haunted cities, and the "jiangshi" (the Chinese vampire), there is no literary work quite like that of Ji Yun.

The author presents his observations on life in the People's Republic of China, based on a six-month visit in 1972.